Gunilla Klingberg’s art creates what are, at the same time, both mental and tangible spaces, in which the viewer is mesmerised, becoming a part of an atmosphere, a special mood, a state. Even if the approach is almost always large-scale – installations, mural paintings, sculptures, projections – it is the little things, the parts that make up the whole, that we must look at in order to grasp the full significance of her works. In the new star-shaped sculpture that she made for Bonniers Konsthall, which materialised like a cosmic sign from another universe in the Konsthall’s entrance hall, it is the surfaces to which we must pay attention. The star is covered in various materials – rugs, flooring, cupboards - from the furnishing giant Ikea. Thus, mass-produced, globalised lifestyle meets extraterrestrial force and mythology, prompting us to ask how they are connected. The supporting structure for the Cosmic Matter sculpture in the Konsthall’s main space is a builder’s scaffolding. Klingberg weaves a system of spaces around it using strips of coloured tape. If we take a closer look at these strips, we see that they depict the different phases of the moon. Set against a dreamcatcher and words like “Global Exploration Strategy” polished into high-gloss steel, the work creates an image of the way in which our notions of the moon are composed of ancient mysteries, as much as they are of a science driven by dreams of territorial expansion into space.
In today’s globalised array of ever more, ever more similar goods and experiences, it is the small, meaningful distinctions that matter. It is a detail of appearance, or the aura of a trademark, that prompts us to choose one object rather than another. The world around us is being increasingly transformed into a surface filled with signs – computer monitors, the urban space, the pages of newspapers – whose most tangible properties are disposability and change. The way we use these surfaces is often the starting point and the material for Klingberg’s art. She uses different visual expressions and materials from our contemporary world, often the overlooked and the commonplace. Her observations of contemporary consumer culture contain a critical undertone that reflects the insight that it is difficult nowadays to talk about anything being outside. We are all implicated in this lifestyle that provides the raw material for her art, whether we like it or not. It quietly confronts us with the question of how our longing for spirituality could so easily be re-formulated as a packet of incense from a clothes shop, or as a best-selling lifestyle guide bought at an airport on the way home from a long-haul holiday.
Gunilla Klingberg’s art is marked by recycling. It is part of a culture of “sampling”, in which, rather than imagining something absolutely new, we combine and recast existing forms and expressions. In her fascination with oriental cultural traditions, in which repetition and reproduction have played an important role, we can see a departure from – and perhaps even a criticism of – western modernity’s demands for innovation and continual progress. One thought underlying the exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall is also that of returning to earlier works, and reworking them or amalgamating them with new ones. The coming together of disparate image cultures, traditions and modes of expression is a recurrent, key feature of Klingberg’s work. Her art intertwines the everyday and the esoteric; oriental patterns meet the Sparlivs supermarket on the corner. Meetings that generate new meanings, which, in the next instant, mutate and form a new context. Like the patterns in an oriental textile, her works are constantly changing, depending on the observer’s point of view, revealing previously hidden connections and patterns that say something important about our contemporary world.
Sara Arrhenius, the exhibition curator and Director of Bonniers Konsthall (2009)